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Its being so cheerful

It has become the great obsession, spawning dozens of books and a growing number of university and school courses, here and in America. Happiness is in vogue, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking we had become a nation of hedonists. Reading about or studying happiness will not necessarily make us cheerful but it could help to solve some old puzzles. Can we achieve the Benthamite goal of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”? Or is it the case that, as Mark Twain once put it, “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination”?

It is easy to scoff at the happiness industry. One of its central claims, that we were at least as happy in the 1950s as now, tells us as much about human nature as the nature of happiness. On the face of it, the message is that material possessions and rising living standards